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Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Did Nature Program Man/Woman To Eat Specific Foods

Did nature have a diet program for humankind? Boyd and Konner in their 1985 report agreed that such a diet program may have existed, at least by implication, when they wrote, “From about 24 –25 million years ago fruits appear to have been the main dietary constituent for hominids”.

For more than 20 million years, as far as the records can show, prehistoric men and women ate mainly fruits to maintain their health, growth, activity and reproduction. The large variety of fruits and the ease of reaching them provided our prehistoric ancestors the required protein and essential amino acids to maintain life. The question is, what transformed man into a meat eater?

Human anatomy and physiology are poorly adapted to the processing of a meat diet. The gastric juices of humans have less active antiseptic and germicidal properties, thus eating raw meat would have caused prehistoric man severe abdominal discomfort, and was the reason they ate mainly roots, barriers, fruits, nuts and grains.

Since raw meat had to be cooked to denature the protein, melt the fat and break down the fibrous tissues to make it palatable, easily chewable and digestible, was the reason man did not eat a significant amount of meat until he was able to harness the use of fire about 500,000 years ago. Before then man was almost entirely a herbivore.

The jump from being a herbivore to a carnivore might have been forced upon man by climatic changes, or a natural disaster that destroyed the forest along with the fruit bearing trees. A large fire could have done that leaving in its wake charred animals. With their main food source destroyed, prehistoric man ate the charred animals, and found them palatable. Thereafter, they increasingly included meat in their diet.

Natural carnivores like lions and tigers are anatomically and physiologically adapted to processing a meat diet. They have short intestinal canals, strong secretions of hydrochloric acid to quickly digest and expel the waste products of the meat they consume before putrefaction - the catalyst for degenerative diseases - can occur.

The intestinal track of humans is 4 times longer than that of a lion or tiger. While the natural carnivore’s intestinal track is smooth to dissolve meat quickly and pass it out of their bodies, man’s intestinal track is corrugated to keep food as long as possible in the intestines until all nutrients are extracted from it.

Because man’s intestinal track is poorly adapted to processing meat, it takes too long for the waste product of meat to pass out of the intestines allowing putrefaction to occur. This causes toxemia, and the onset of degenerative diseases like obesity, gallstones, colon cancer, hypertension, stroke, heart disease, gout, tooth decay, piles, peptic ulcers and hardening of the arteries.

In spite of the known health risk, having eaten a diet including animal flesh for more than half a million years and enjoyed it, it is understandable why man is not in a hurry to return to a totally vegetarian diet; not to mention the deficiencies of iron, vitamins B12 and D that tend to result from a vegetarian diet.

Meanwhile, the human anatomy had changed in response to eating animal flesh. Our jaws and teeth have become smaller, and our stomachs have shrunk. These changes have made us less adapted to living entirely on fruits, vegetables, roots and nuts; and suggests that we will continue to eat animal flesh in the foreseeable future, in order to more easily extract the protein and essential amino acids necessary to maintain life.

In addition to animal protein, we are consuming increasing amounts of salt, sugar and saturated fat. The consequences of the consumption of this high calorie diet are all around us. The rates of obesity are rising in the general population. The percentage of children who are overweight has doubled in the last 20 years. The percentage of adolescents who are obese has tripled in the last 20 years.

We have a war on our hands, and it’s a war against ‘calories’. A calorie is a unit of energy. A food with 250 calories means that your body will derive that much energy from eating or drinking it. The body needs calories for energy, but if you eat more calories than you can burn by your daily activity, the excess calories are converted to fat that causes overweight and obesity.

Certain thyroid problems and genetic factors are involved in weight gain and obesity, but their effects are magnified by the quantity and type of foods we eat. Work with your nutritionist on healthy food choices, small to medium food portion size, and new ways of preparing food.